Tag Archives: San Diego

New Orleans author Adrian Van Young, author of the novel Shadows in Summerland, and the short story collection The Man Who Noticed Everything, recently read at the very first installment of our literary reading series, The Foundry, in April. We loved having him in town and showing him off for you all, and now he is busy showing us off. Check out what Adrian has to say about Black Candies: Gross and Unlikeable, publishing next week, on Black Friday, November 25th.

Gross and Unlikeable is our collection of short fiction and art exclusively by women contributors. We are proud of and madly in love with this work, and hope you will be too.

“The writers in this anthology breathe life into characters and conflagrations that are frightening and fearful, cagey and forthright, familiar and unknowable, repulsive and endearing, vulnerable and indomitable, befuddling and unmistakable, gross and unlikeable, yes, i.e. human. Together, they churn up a vital miasma of horror’s sub-genres to create something heedless, fresh and lasting. Reading this book is like being drawn and quartered by a stampede of half-decayed, red-eyed horses.”

–Adrian Van Young, author of Shadows in Summerland

We have never been drawn and quartered by a stampede of any horses, much less half-decayed, red-eyed ones, but we now know what Adrian thinks it feels like. We can’t wait to show you the way our authors take horror’s sub-genres and stand them on end in this beautiful volume. PRE ORDER IT NOW!

Friday Night Liberty – November 4, 2016, 6:30 – 8:30 PM
Experience all the ARTS DISTRICT has to offer is by attending a FREE Friday Night Liberty art walk. Taking place on the first Friday of every month from 5-9 PM, Friday Night Liberty is San Diego’s biggest FREE monthly art event! Meet working artists, enjoy dance, theatre and music performances, visit museums and galleries and explore the growing District. Visitors can start their stroll at the Dick Laub NTC Command Center – 2640 Historic Decatur Road and pick up a monthly program and District map. More details here.

Send us your show theme suggestions! What kind of show would YOU be interested in attending? What kind of show would you want to write for? Even if it’s a variation of a theme we’ve already done! We want to hear from our audience, our fans, our writers, our coaches, our friends, our friends of friends, our moms, because you’re all so brainy and funny yet tender and have really good taste.

Here it is. The gorgeous cover for the forthcoming edition of our anthology of literary horror and dark fiction by women, Black Candies: Gross and Unlikeable. Publication date: Black Friday, November 25th, 2016.

Gross and unlikeable is reality. When women tackle the stories that are handed down to them or muck about in the narratives bodies share or live in the liminal as they do in this collection, they aren’t evoking a theme, but destroying the lie of women tamed, of women just so.

Aging, relationships, stupidly catchy songs, you name it. Will we be happier when we’re old or will we just keep getting sadder? Come for some stories about the things that happen as we get older, the things that happen to those around us as they get older, and the inevitability of the passage of time.

Send us your work! We want to hear your stories, and we want to see you on our stage.

Submissions for our October VAMP are due this upcoming Sunday night, 10/2, at midnight. The showcase will be Thursday, October 27th at Whistle Stop Bar. The theme? “Skeletons in the Closet.” We hope you have fun with this one.

What do monsters and our darkest, messiest secrets have in common? They’re hiding away in the closet, tucked beneath the bed, balancing trapeze-style from the rafters and why doesn’t the protagonist ever think to look up?

VAMP: Skeletons in the Closet is a showcase of stories about the things we tuck away, the things we only think about in the thick of night, when nobody is watching, when nobody is around to help. Or maybe you actually did once find some bones hanging up behind your winter coats.

The freshly-pressed newest issue of The Radvocate is filled to the brim with really great poetry, fiction, and non-fiction, and we can’t wait for you to read it. Order your copy now!

If you’ll be in San Diego this Saturday, September 24th, come buy it directly from our Launch Party and Reading at The Glashaus, and we will also regale you with performances from the book. The reading will feature Radvocate contributors Anthony Martin, Dania Brett, Ryan Hicks, Sara Morrison, and Karl Sherlock, who we feature today.

Karl’s poem, “Pointless Drama: A Poem in Five Acts,” is strange, compelling, and sprawling. Here’s an excerpt:

Act I: Rising Action

[to be heralded in rumblings and preparatory ramblings in a deep off-stage voice–ideally Morgan Freeman or Colleen Dewhurst]

Dropa nineteen forty-
something U.S. penny
from a skyscraper at
midnight and all at once
it’s a point in search of
conclusion, earth-bound, seventy-
some stories high becoming lower,
and the “low” of lower nearing
a point of zero acceleration, when
the gravity of the one story that remains
remains a story yet to be plumbed–
an upward zephyr in a downward yaw
over turvy then top; brake lights below
look up, threading a z-axis
on a grid of tarmac, and it’s all
a solid universe of the now
parked cars busting into stars, until
points are swallowing their outsides
in, birthing an infinite number of zeros
hobnailed on the cumbrous streets, while
windows whiplash into the doppler-
shifting slipstreams, wheat stalks
emancipated form a droplet of copper
smelted from sky, a russet exhale
that knocked its quantum of worth
right out of Abraham.

Karl Sherlock is a Poetry Writing instructor and the Co-Coordinator of the Creative Writing Program at Grossmont College, in San Diego. He holds an MFA in Writing from the University of California, Irvine, and is a Fulbright alumnus and Academy of American Poets Prize recipient. His poems have appeared in Cream City Review, Dickinson Review, South Coast Poetry Journal, Alsop Review, gay writers journals such as The James White Review and Assaracus, and others. His prose memoirs have appeared in anthologies, including So Say We All’s The Far East, and in journals like Limehawk, for which he was a finalist for Sundress Publication’s 2014 “Best of the Net.”

The Radvocate 14, just published last week, is filled to the brim with really great poetry, fiction, and non-fiction, and we can’t wait for you to read it. Order your copy now!

If you’ll be in San Diego on Saturday, September 24th, come buy it directly from our Launch Party and Reading at The Glashaus, and we will also regale you with performances from the book. The reading will feature Radvocate contributors Karl Sherlock, Anthony Martin, Dania Brett, Ryan Hicks, and Sara Morrison, who we feature today.

Sara’s story in issue fourteen, “Mother,” is a little bit ghost story, a little bit desert noir, and a little bit sad. Here’s a brief excerpt:

He poked the fire while taking a swig of Jack from the bottle. An ember bounced out of the makeshift fire ring, prompting him to give it a swift burial beneath his worn leather boot. Toasting to the night sky, he took another drink, wishing his mother another birthday.

She would have been fifty this year. He was torn about returning to the desert for the occasion, thinking there might be a grander way to celebrate, but nothing else seemed appropriate. This was her sanctuary. The Joshua trees silhouetting the horizon as the evening light waned represented the background of his childhood and the scenery to her life.

Chuckling softly to himself, he remembered his insistence that she carry him to bed after each bath. “You are getting too heavy for this,” she’d counter. In the end, she always obliged, hefting him down the hall wrapped tightly in a towel.

Sara Morrison is a native San Diegan who finds inspiration in long drives through the desert and delving into local history. As a creative Pisces, she discovers and deciphers her world through writing stories, composing art of all types, constructing mixtapes and delving into science with her inquisitive son. Find her online on Twitter @karmiclife and as a regular contributor to @ElephantWords.

In case you missed it, the newest issue of So Say We All’s literary journal, The Radvocate, hit the mean streets this week. Issue fourteen is filled to the brim with poetry, fiction, and non-fiction. We can’t wait for you to read it. Order your copy now!

Our very own Matt E. Lewis, The Radvocate’s founding editor and a huge part of So Say We All, answered some questions from So Say We All’s Julia Dixon Evans, on the dawn of issue 14:

JULIA DIXON EVANS: The Radvocate 14 is the second issue to be published with us, in book form. How has it felt different from the zine days?

MATT E. LEWIS: For one thing, it’s been a lot less leg work! The zine days were fun, but extremely time consuming, as I’d have to print, organize, fold and staple hundreds of copies by hand for each issue. Being able to delegate work for editing, formatting, and graphic design has only made it a better publication, and I’m quite happy to see multiple hands making it whole instead of just slapping stuff together myself. It feels like much more of a group effort, and that makes it all the more satisfying to see the final version.

JULIA: What do you want the world to know about issue 14?

MATT: I’m very proud of Issue #14 because it’s the pinnacle of everything that we wanted The Radvocate to be from the very beginning. The transition from zine-to-journal in Issue #13 felt a bit jarring, and I think it took some getting used to for some people out there. This issue is where I feel like The Radvocate has gained it’s footing in the new format, and we’ve felt much more comfortable accepting some amazing work to be featured in it. I’m proud of the fact that we are featuring fiction and poetry that doesn’t all read as a long, homogeneous “product” but instead features a diversity of voices and styles that stand on their own as well as reading well together in a beautiful, chaotic way. I suppose the cover art could be interpreted as a metaphor for the content—an explosion of self-expression hidden just below a calm surface.

JULIA: What are some other literary journals or websites that you love? What stuff inspires you to keep working on lit mags and publishing

MATT: I’m frequently impressed with the quality of books coming from Unnamed Press, based in Los Angeles – everything I’ve read from them has been consistently excellent, but also risk-taking, which is great to see. The same goes for the website Dark Fucking Wizard, which always features damn good work from well-known names and up-and-comers. In fact, that’s where I first read Eric Raymond’s story, “Notes from the Donut Hole”, which we ended up publishing (poaching?) for Issue #14. The two journals I always check out are Shabby Doll House from Lucy K. Shaw, Sara Jean Alexander, and Stacey Teague, and Lumen, run by Rosemary Donahue and Yesenia Padilla. They are the future. But the consistent inspiration always comes from the dedicated individuals behind all these great projects—Cameron Pierce at Lazy Fascist, Rose O’Keefe at Eraserhead, Tobias Carroll at Vol.1 Brooklyn, Aaron Burch at Hobart, J. David Osbourne at Broken River, Constance Ann Fitzgerald at Ladybox, Michael J. Seidlinger at CCM—all of them focused a hundred percent on bringing their projects into the world, and making the literary community rad because of it. I guess that’s what motivates me, is to know that we’re not alone in all this and that creating literary projects really does have an impact on real people out there.

MATT: I think the appeal is in listening to people make themselves vulnerable, which is infinitely more interesting then the traditional “characters” depicted in most mass media. Even when they’re reciting fiction or poetry, to go up in front of a large crowd and bare yourself like that—whether we like it or not, our work is always a reflection of ourselves, is fascinating to us on a primal level, to the part of our brain that craves stories, not just visual stimuli. Not to mention so much of our lives are lived online now, how often does a real person—not a loved one or friend, but a near stranger—open up to you in a non-reciprocating, non-judgmental way? Even though an audience isn’t required to respond, I think we have it hard-wired in us to be drawn to those all-too-human expressions of self. Also, you don’t have to stare at a screen! How novel, right?

JULIA: What’s next for the Radvocate? When will you read submissions for the next issue?

MATT: I’m hoping that The Radvocate will continue to evolve in a non-linear way, and branch out to non-print and mixed media in the near future. It would never have survived this long if it just stayed the same has it had been in 2011. I’m all about embracing changes and innovations within it, and I know So Say We All thinks the same way, which is a great feeling. Submissions will open up again in December 2016, so mark your calendars!

So Say We All’s literary journal, The Radvocate, just published a brand new issue this week. You can buy your copy right here.

We’ll feature excerpts of some of the pieces here on our site, and today we have Joe Baumann’s fantastic short story, “Shrinking.” Every so often, we run across stories in the slush pile that we repeatedly find ourselves bringing up at the dinner table, referencing in casual conversation as though the entire world has already read it. Here’s a snippet:

[…] It was clear that it was, in fact, my parents and their house, because the rest of the world was normal-sized. My car fit in my driveway, but I had to park on the curb in front of their house because my tires dug trenches in the yard if I tried to squeeze onto the concrete; even the grass had been reduced to stalks the size of cat hairs, and I could barely fit my hand in their mailbox to grab the bills.

The day I had to stoop to enter the garage, I called my sister.

“I think you need to make a trip out to see Mom and Dad.”

“Why? Is everything okay?”

“They’re shrinking.”

“Old people do that.”

“No, I mean everything is shrinking.”

“Is this one of your bad jokes I don’t understand?”

“No, it isn’t.”

“What about Mom’s blood tests?”

“White blood cell count was slightly elevated, and her blood pressure was still high, but nothing the doctor said to worry about.”

Joe Baumann‘s fiction and essays have appeared in Tulane Review, Willow Review, Hawai’i Review, SNReview, Lindenwood Review, and many others. He is the author of Ivory Children, published in 2013 by Red Bird Chapbooks. He possesses a PhD in English from the University of Louisiana-Lafayette and teaches composition, creative writing, and literature at St. Charles Community College in Cottleville, Missouri. He was recently nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and for inclusion in Best American Short Stories 2016. He is also the editor-in-chief of The Gateway Review: A Journal of Magic Realism.